UNLV Retrospective Theses & Dissertations

1-1-1999

The disability press: A wheel still in spin

Cindy Schwartz McCoy University of Nevada, Las Vegas

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Repository Citation McCoy, Cindy Schwartz, "The disability press: A wheel still in spin" (1999). UNLV Retrospective Theses & Dissertations. 1027. http://dx.doi.org/10.25669/g7xz-k2ur

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. THE DISABILITY PRESS: A WHEEL STILL IN SPIN

by

Cindy Schwartz McCoy

Bachelor of Arts The University of the State of New York 1990

Master of Arts The University of Santa Monica 1990

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the

Master of Arts Degree Hank Greenspun Department of Communication Studies Greenspun College of Urban Affairs

Graduate College University of Nevada, Las Vegas August 1999

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Copyright by Cindy Schwartz McCoy 1999 All Rights Reserved

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Thesis Approval UNIV The Graduate College University of Nevada, Las Vegas

July 27 19 99

The Thesis prepared by

Cindy Schwartz McCoy

Entitled

The Disability Press; A Wheel Still in Spl]

is approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts in Communication ______

Examination Committee Chair

Dean of the Graduate College

Examination CommilSée iber

Examinanon Committee Mtter

Graduate College Faculty Representative

11

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ABSTRACT

The Disability Press: A Wheel Still in Spin

by

Cindy Schwartz McCoy

Dr. Richard Jensen, Examination Committee Chair Professor of Communication University of Nevada, Las Vegas

This study, exploring the messages of the disability press, also utilizes Marxist theory to

explain empowerment in the disability community. Although Marxism has significant

value for explaining disability oppression, Marx’s theory of internal relations, describing an

interconnected web of organizational structure and the accompanying relationships, sheds

light on the political nature of disability empowerment. A world view characterized by an

economic base and social superstructure models an intrinsically enmeshed impairment base

and social superstructure model of disability. The covers and cover stories of Mouth.

Mainstream. Ragged Edge, and New Mobility magazines are catalogued and a

representative sample is analyzed in order to demonstrate the political nature of the

disability community’s empowerment.

m

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ABSTRACT...... üi

TABLE OF CONTENTS ...... iv

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS...... v

CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION ...... 1 The Disability Press and Empowerment...... 1

CHAPTER II A DISABILITY HISTORY ...... 13 A History of Disability Oppression...... 13

CHAPTER III METHODOLOGY...... 28

CHAPTER IV ANALYSIS ...... 42 The Messages ...... 45 Summary...... 51 Conclusion...... 56

CHAPTER V CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE STUDY...... 59 Political Awareness...... 59

BIBLIOGRAPHY...... 68

VITA ...... 74

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to my examining committee, especially Dr. Richard Jensen

Thanks to my listeners

And my angels

To Dr. Richard Visone. who reminded me just to write while the rest of my world did

whatever

To Mishu

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INTRODUCTION

The Disability Press And Empowerment

Alternative methods of communicating about disability have been necessary since

the passage of the1990 Americans With Disabilities Act (Mitchell & Snyder, 19967, p. 12).

Mainstream structures responsible for the portrayal of disability are slowly but surely

changing (Clogçton, 1992 & Haller, 1995). “(I)nterest in the social and political

dimensions of disablement has intensified considerably both at the general level and in

universities and academic institutions” ( Bames, 1997, p.l). Additionally, “with the rise in

people’s consciousness, a disability culture, based on shared experience, has emerged”

(Iwakuma, 1997). Stephen Brown names some of the many grass roots movements, the

disability press, analytical academic organizations, and artistic endeavors as the tip of the

Disability Culture Movement (Brown, 1998, p.l). Lathrop (1995) recognizes the role of

the disability press:

Like other minority communities did in the past, the disability community has

begun to build upon common ground through the written word—through

publications such as Mouth. Mainstream, the Disabilitv Rag, and New Mobility, as

well as in the national and local levels—reporting news, providing role models,

exploring important issues, and covering the concerns of the community (p.35).

1

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Stereotypical images have served as the primary public locus for disability

identification (Shapiro, 1995). While mainstream culture used negative images to define

the subjects and circumstances of disability, individuals with disabilities internalized the

images, invalidating their own human experiences (Charlton, 1998). Movie screen images

and literary characters have taken predictable forms that comprise ableism (Nelson, 1997).

Ableism is that set of often contradictory stereotypes about people with disabilities

that acts as a barrier to keep them from achieving their full potential as equal

citizens in society. Among these are the beliefe that people with disabilities are

inherently able to manage their own lives, that they are embittered and malevolent,

and that they are, by reason of their disability, morally, intellectually, and spiritually

inferior to temporarily able-bodied people, or, conversely, that people with

disabilities are saintlike, ever cheerful, asexual, childlike, and unusually heroic.

Ultimately, it is the belief that people with disabilities are different from “normal”

people, and that their lives are inherently less worthwhile than those of people

without disabilities. (Pelka, 1997, p.3)

Today, disabled journalists, poets, and story tellers are

expanding the array of options from which to imagine the lives of people with

disabilities. Such first person narratives provide readers with an alternative

perspective on what it is to live with a disability.. . . Autobiographical narratives

demand that the disabled subject develop a voice that privileges the agency of a

bona fide perspective of disability (Mitchell & Snyder, 1997 p. 10).

Chapter two details disability history, historical images, and autobiographical narrative.

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Beginning with historical images of disability, this study addresses changes

occurring in perceptions of the disability experience. The disability press and discourses of

disability construction demonstrate how the disability community is transforming from an

ignored and silent body to an empowered constituency. Then, drawing on Marxism as a

foundation for understanding disability oppression and as the social structure for

explaining its empowerment, an analysis of of Mouth. Ragged Edge. New Mobility, and

Mainstream magazine article and cover pages provide clues to a subculture’s definitions of

reality. In some cases, foundational studies are included in the introduction, more are

included in later chapters. This study builds on the dissertation of Ransom (1997). The

abstract for Ransom’s study states that

very few scholars have studied media produced by and for people with disabilities.

This dissertation is one of the first attempts to do so, and to analyze how these

publications may help forge group identity. The study examines the tensions of

liberal-pluralism and Marxist theories and their ability to explain the function of

disability publications in American society. The researcher explored disability

publication editors’ perceptions about disability related issues, and examines how

disability related publications are similar to feminist and African American

publications (Ransom, 1997).

The Disabilitv Press

The disability press, gaining popularity after the passage of the Americans with

Disabilities Act in 1990, captures and perpetuates the sentiments of an entire community,

proposes Douglas Lathrop, as he details founding philosophies of New Mobility. Mouth.

Mainstream, and the Disabilitv Rag. In “Challenging Perceptions,” published in the

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literary journal. The Quill. Lathrop (1995) recognizes the existence of shared

commonalties and polarities within the community. He discusses the case of Ellen Stohl

and Lucy G win, two women, both with disabilities, both dedicated to changing

stereotypes, but with opposing views and tactics. Stohl, challenging the idea that disabled

equals ugly, appeared in a Plavbov pictorial with wheelchair flaunted. Gwin rages against

the idea that people with disabilities must be sugar-coated and prettified before they

experience media exposure (p. 36). Both express views that stray fi-om popular images,

even though they seem to conflict.

The magazines, all offering alternatives to prevailing images, are contextually and

editorially diverse. Lathrop (1995) presents the commonality of people telling their own

stories and coming to see themselves as part of a group with common civil-rights

struggles as evidence that a community exists. He recognizes that all the intracommunity

publications want to tell the real story—not the routinely used tear-jerker or inspirational

parable. But each is singular in its philosophical mission. Lathrop points out that New

Mobüitv magazine wants to present readers with images of disabled people leading

independent and active lives. Lathrop reports New Mobility editor Barry Corbet’s belief

that by presenting images that are positive but not patronizing, the magazine increases the

public profile of the disability community.

Lathrop (1995) goes on to say that conversely. Mouth magazine is committed to

the coverage of the disability-rights movement with a militant, in-your-face attitude. It

proclaims the disability movement as the most recent civil rights movement and demands

that the nondisabled see past their pity. The Disabilitv Rag, states its mission, Lathrop

says, as analysis of the roots of discrimination and disenfi-anchisement. Maintaining a

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dedication to civil rights, it shows the consumer’s, the professional’s and the radical’s side

of the experience. The author finally reports that Mainstream magazine is one of the

community’s moderate voices covering current issues and lifestyle/culture features.

The Social Model

In 1980, The World Health Organization (WHO) developed the International

Classification of Impairments, Disabilities and Handicaps (ICIDH) which intended to

provide a global fi'ame of reference for understanding disability. In the ICIDH scheme, the

word “impairment” describes functional deficits and the term “disability” refers to any

interference with personal activities. The term “handicap” conceptualizes any hindrances

imposed by society on the individual because of the impairment. The various models

proposed to explain and classify disablements may be expressed in a dialectic of the

“medical model” vs. the “social model”. The medical model views the disablement

phenomenon as a “personal” problem, “giving paramount importance to the physiological

features of illness and impairment, including certain expectations of medical care”

(Lonsdale, 1990. p. 34). Health care is viewed as the main issue and at the political level it

is health care policy that is of primary importance. The social model of disablement, on the

other hand, “regards disability as a complex of constraints that the able-bodied population

imposes on the behavior of... impaired people” (Liachowitz, 1988, p. 1). Disablement is

not an attribute of the person, but a complex collection of conditions, many of which are

created by the societal environment. Hence the management of the problem requires social

action and it is the collective responsibility of society to make the environmental

modifications necessary for the full participation of people with disabilities into all areas of

social life. The issue is, therefore, an attitudinal or ideological one which requires social

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change, while at political level it is a question of human rights (World Health

Organization, 1997). The social construction of disability assumes that barriers to fuU

inclusion He in society and not in the individual. The implications and repercussions of that

consciousness shift have been addressed by many in various disciplines and formats.

Electronic communication provides information about community politics,

philosophy, psychology, and fantasies. There are advocacy listservs like Justice For All

and the one ADAPT disseminates. There are chat lines like the one hosted by New

Mobility, with no moderation or registration process required. There are moderated lists

hosting conversation threads about any and all subjects but with a ibcus on specific

disability issues such as spinal cord injury, mobility, physical/sexual abuse, attendant care.

Academic lists, like Disability-Dialogues and Disability-Research, both originating at the

University of Leeds in the United Kingdom, but attended globally, provide an arena for a

broad range of subjects. One recent discussion explored definitions of the disability

community.

The debate rages as to the ethnicity of disability, who is included, the purposes of

community and the relationship of the disabled community to mainstream culture. British

scholar Ayesha Vernon explores the issue of commonality and difference in the disabled

people’s movement in the archived version of this Leeds conference presentation. She

recognizes that the oppression of disability is complicated by additional “otherness” of

gender, race, sexuality, class, and age but claims that the push for eradicating disability

(the social stigma and political barriers of impairment) must be a war against all prejudicial

action. She summarizes by questioning if the disability movement would be well served by

forming an alliance with other groups fighting oppression (Vemon, 1997).

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Marxism And Disabilitv

James Charlton’s Nothing About Us Without Us understands the dimensions of

enforced oppression through Marxist principles of hegemony, false consciousness and

alienation. He recognizes that “(t)he oppression of 500 million people with disabilities is

rooted in the political-economic and cultural dimensions of everyday life” ( 1998, p.20).

Calling his book “part descriptive, part conversational, part theoretical, and wholly

argumentative” Charlton “synthesizes theories and opinions about oppression and

exploitation, power and ideology, resistance and empowerment” (p.20). The author’s

threefold mission challenges existing epistemologies and ontologies of disability. Charlton

names Marxist theory as a basis for understanding existing practices and new foundations,

structures and contexts in which to think about the relationships and conditions of

oppression and resistance and to understand and support disability rights.

There are other volumes that include Marxist-Disability discussions. In the article

“Work, Utopia and impairment”, [the author’s capitalization], appearing in Disabilitv &

Societv: emerging issues and insights. Paul Abberly (1996) contends that “(i)n terms of

the analysis of the oppression of disabled people in capitalist societies, Marxism has

provided effective tools, but in relation to Marxist Utopian thought I think we encounter

profound difficulties for impaired people” (p, 68). Michael Oliver (1996), in

Understanding Disabilitv: from theory to practice, suggests that Marxist theory is useful in

approaching disability at an ontological level. He also refers to Marx in discussions of

political economy and empowerment.

Colin Bames (1997) writes that “to appreciate fully the extent and significance of

the oppression of disabled people an understanding of history and its relationship to

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western culture: the central value system around which western society is clustered, is

vital” . The socio-political theory “rooted on the materialist analysis of history associated

with Marx maintains that disability and dependence are the social creation of industrial

capitalism” (1997). Citing Michael Oliver’s The Politics of Disablement. Bames (1997)

points out that the tragic theory of disability, one based on the rise of the institution as a

means of both social provision and control under capitalism resulted in the emergence of

the individual medical approach to disability. This personal tragedy theory of disablement

has, he says, achieved ideological hegemony in that it has become translated into the

emergence of capitalist society (1997).

Methodology

Although the oppression of disability may be understood through Marxist theories

of economic, socio-political, and historical aspects, it is the complex relationship between

those aspects that can be used to explain disability empowerment. Because “(s)ocial

formations are a complex hierarchy of functionally organized institutions or instances

whose entity can neither be ignored altogether nor reduced to a single closed system”

(Resch, 1992, p.35) and because “the individual is held to be in some kind of union with

his object; they are relationally contained in one another” (Oilman, 1976, p.28), then the

collective impact of the ADA, the disability press, and empowering narrative is significant

for community formation and empowerment.

The disability press is a useful representation of the disability experience. Marxism

is a useful structure for explaining significant aspects of the disability experience.

Therefore, it follows that Marxian analysis is an appropriate methodology for

understanding the images and text of the disability press as interpretation of the disability

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experience. Although orthodox Marxist theory is concerned with the economic and

institutional analysis of media systems, studies after 1980 have examined media as an

ideological practice. Such critical interpretations employ various analytic methods to

determine the ways in which “a particular text or group of texts functions as part of

ideological practice and offers a system of knowledge or a way of experiencing the world

for a (reader). An ideological criticism of the text and images can “clarify how and why

the medium carries the meanings and values it does for its audience” (White, 1987, p. 142).

This study parallels a 1996 essay from the feminist perspective by Sonia Foss. Like Foss, I

focus on the “process by which (a minority group) comes to see their symbols rituals and

regular practices—the content of their experiences that tends to be overlooked in the

(dominant) world view (Foss, 1996, p. 205). Foss (1996) explains

A prerequisite to having their voices heard in a discursive fonnation or the

dominant culture is that members of a submerged group must develop their own

authentic voice. They must develop knowledge and discourse out of their own

experiences and interpret and label these experiences in their own terms. Perhaps

even more important, they must come to see their experiences as legitimate and

valuable. Developing this authenticity and attributing power are difficult for a

submerged group, however, because their experience has been interpreted for them

for so long by others and devalued by those others. The submerged group has been

trained to see itself as represented in the dominant discourse of the culture and has

come to subordinate even its authentic and potentially powerful voice to that

culture (Schulz, 1984). . . . But empowerment cannot happen without a strong

sense of identity within the submerged group apart from the dominant culture.

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Group members first must possess the “courage to be and to speak . . . the

Courage to Blaspheme” (Daly, 1978) the definitions of themselves as powerless

that have been established by the dominant discourse (1996, p. 206).

Mitchell & Snyde (1997) interpret the mechanisms of misrepresentation for the disability

community:

In discussions of the ways in which disability has been historically represented . .

. disability scholars have also begun to identify working catalogs of disability’s

cultural meanings. Such a catalog reflects ableist projections onto disability, and

consequently, a compilation of these restrictive narrative possibilities reveals the

method by which disability has been colonized . .. ( p. 20)..

Expecting to find an array of blasphemous expressions directed at oppressors, this study

analyzes magazine messages for examples of group identity: self-defined contradictions to

prevailing designations.

It is simplistic to explain the increased visibility of people with disabilities by

crediting federally legislated change. The Americans with Disabilities Act created a

network of rules governing the inclusion and access for people with disabilities into the

culture. Legislation may not explain a community’s growing awareness of personal needs.

In an attempt to more fully understand the phenomenon of disability empowerment, it

makes sense to integrate current thinking about the social construction of disability into

any explanation of that change. If one understands that a large part of the problem of

impairment, the handicap, originates in social structure, then one naturally begins to search

for keys to alleviation there.

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This study examines the cover and cover stories from four popular magazines

representing the disability press. Mouth. Mainstream, and the Disabilitv Rag are cross-

disability publications, Mainstream is written for those with mobility impairments. Mouth

and Disabilitv Rag are grass roots type issues, which are inexpensively printed in black and

white on plain paper, they accept no advertising. Mainstream and Mainstream are glossy,

frill-color magazines with advertisements appropriate to the readership. The latter issues

send complimentary copies to professional offices, the former are available by subscription

only. Although the publications all address the disability experience from an insider’s

vantage point, this study anticipates finding as many differences as similarities between the

issues that accept advertising and those that do not. The similarities may be analyzed to

tell the story of a group’s empowerment, publishing messages that contradict the

dominant culture’s excluding beliefe and practices.

Every attempt to study the disability community, from strength to weakness, and

all in between, is an attempt to understand a feared, stigmatized, and ignored state of

being. Mitchell and Snyder (1997) assert that a ‘Sosible increase in the number of scholars

with disabilities would radically affect the ways in which we imagine this constituency’s

relationship within and to social institutions” (p. 2). Beyond that, it is an attempt to

understand our culture and the human nature that drives it. Theresa Thompson, a pioneer

in the field of disability communication, documents a 12 year journey to find a home for

her research. Beginning in the early seventies, she found studies matching her own

disability communications interests in psychology journals, special education studies, the

field of sociology, especially the work of Erving Gofifinan, and health communications.

Thompson refers to the first journal that exclusively covered disability issues, Disabilitv

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Studies Quarterly, which appeared in 1980, and filled a large gap in scholarly

communications about disabilities studies. Thompson hails the creation of the Caucus on

Communication and Disability, part of the National Communication Association, as an

appropriate home for her research on communication and disability. Wanting to redefine

how colleges and universities view people with disabilities, several scholars are dedicated

to creating disability studies departments as separate entities.

When Barbara Walters interviewed Tom Hanks for the “Top 10 Interesting People

of 1998”, she asked if he cared that he was considered as having no sex appeal. He told

her that he knew that people said that, and he totally embraced that about himself. That

made him kind of sexy, didn’t she think. As people with disabilities embrace their

differences, the result is strength, empowerment and ability: the new images projected in

the disability press.

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A DISABILITY HISTORY

A History of Disability Oppression

Although recent social changes have had a positive effect for many in the disabled

community, “(t)he vast majority of people with disabilities have always been poor,

powerless, and degraded. Disability oppression is a product of both the past and the

present. . . [it is a] remnant of ancien régimes of politics and economics, customs and

beliefs” (Charlton, 1998, p.21). Capitalism, the primary system of social and economic

exchange in the Western world , “emphasizes the strong economic reasons for the

exclusion of disabled people. It is the embodiment of these social and economic relations

under capitalism which has led directly to the exclusion of disabled people within capitalist

societies” (Oliver. 1990, p. 21). Since contributing “conditions correspond at every stage

to the simultaneous development of the productive forces, their history is at the same time

the history of the evolving productive forces taken over by each generation, and is

therefore the history of the development of the individuals themselves” ( Marx & Engels,

1965, p.72). James Charlton, in Nothing About Us Without Us. presents disability

oppression as a multidimensional characteristic of the disability experience. This chapter

models his format. Disability empowerment, when viewed from a historical perspective.

13

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appears not so much as a reaction of revolutionary structural shifts, but as an evolutionary

process, a cumulative aggregate of subtle and immense changes.

Political and Economic History: Leading to the ADA

There is a tendency to name economic determinants as the primary cause of

disability oppression. “On one level a political economy of disability is easy to establish.

That people with disabilities are powerless and poor is incontestable. Every socioeconomic

indicator says so. Since feudalism and even earlier, they have lived outside the economy

and political process” (Charlton, 1998, p.37). The value of those lives lived outside

normal boundaries has been debated through time. Movements to exterminate, manipulate,

and hide people with disabilities have existed, in some cases simultaneously with

programs to support and subsidize them.

Early twentieth century programs, like the Veterans Bureau and the Social

Security Act, made taking care of the disabled a national responsibility. At the same time,

eugenics, a movement proposing heredity improvement and threatening the existence of

that same population, was receiving media attention. The American eugenics movement

called for forced sterilization of the disabled: “while eugenics claimed to be purely

objective,... subjective values, such as aesthetic standards of beauty and ugliness and

moral attributes of responsibility, were central to eugenic constructions of hereditary

disease and disability” (Pemick, 1997, p. 90).

Beautiful children with disabilities were the tools of charity fund raising telethons

like Jerry Lewis’ Labor Day Show. The use of poster child images capitalized on ableist

sentiments, raising funds and soothing public consciousness. Telethons are recognized as

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demeaning and paternalistic shows which celebrate and encourage pity. .. . Other

problems are that they give the public the idea that everything is taken care of, that

there’s no need to worry about discrimination or civil rights or social services,

because “those people” have “their charities” to take care of them (Pelka, 1997, p.

302).

In recent years, former poster kids and activist groups, including Evan Kemp, Jr. and

Jerry’s Orphans, have mobilized each year to picket the television stations airing the

shows.

The Salk vaccine discovery in 1952 encouraged the public to believe disability and

illness was curable and should be cured. “Disability .. exceeds a culture’s predictive

capacities and effective interventions” (Mitchell & Snyder, 1997, p. 3). GuUt and shame,

natural psychological consequences, are assaults to the ego.

Guilt is the attack of the superego, or conscience, and shame arises from the

opprobrium of others.. . . The sociologist George Herbert Mead wrote that an

individual’s concept of his or her self is a reflection, or, more accurately, a

refraction. As in a fun-house mirror, of the way he or she is treated by others. And

if a person is treated with ridicule, contempt or aversion, then his own ego is

diminished, his dignity and humanity are called into question. . . . Damage to the

body, then, causes diminution of the self, which is further magnified by the

debasement of others (Murphy, p. 92).

Ten years after Salk’s discovery, James Meredith walked into the University of

Mississippi in 1962, and Ed Roberts, the founder of the independent living movement,

rolled into the University of California at Berkeley. Roberts had severe physical

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limitations caused by the polio virus he had contracted when he was 14. He believed he

should be able to attend the university despite his need for an iron lung. By 1967, he and

his cohorts, the “12 Rolling Quads” were a power on the Berkeley campus. In 1970, the

antidropout student program was being run primarily by and for physically disabled

students. The program was funded by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare

($81,000) and the University of California ($2000). The first Center for Independent

Living opened in March 1972, serving San Francisco. It was nonstudent directed,

supporting a growing population of area residents with disabilities. On the opposite coast,

Judy Heumann, another polio survivor, won a discrimination suit against the New York

School District and began a political action organization, ‘Disabled in Action’ (Shapiro,

1995).

That same year, a precursor to the ADA passed quietly. The Rehabilitation Act of

1972, section 504, “making it illegal for any federal agency, public university, defense or

other federal contractor, or any other institution or activity that received federal funding to

discriminate against anyone ‘solely by reasonof... handicap’ ” (Shapiro, 1994, p. 65)

passed into law.

1974 brought a newly devoted Justin Dart back to the U.S. and the disability rights

cause. Dart, post-polio, having lived a privileged life, spent years in Japan studying

Ghandi’s writing and rehabilitating his soul. He returned to wage a countrywide, politically

educational campaign for people with disabilities. In 1981, Evan Kemp, Jr., presidential

advisor and former poster child, attacked the Muscular Dystrophy Association for its pity

based fund- raising tactics (Shapiro, 1995).

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Active protest became part of the disability empowerment scene in 1978 with a

small but powerful civil rights movement “The beginnings of Americans Disabled for

Attendant Programs Today (ADAPT) can be traced to a small demonstration in

Colorado” (Pelka, p. 123). Using the nonviolent tactics of Martin Luther King’s civil rights

demonstration, ADAPT (at that time signifying American Disabled for Accessible Public

Transit) demanded the availability of accessible buses in Denver. Disabled demonstrators

effectively halted bus service throughout the city by surrounding buses with wheelchairs,

attempting to crawl into the vehicles and occupying administrative offices. Winning a

victory in Denver (a city erected plaque commemorates the event), ADAPT focused on

ensuring passage of civil rights legislation and finally to its current focus on affordable

attendant care programs paid for by a reduction of nursing home funding.

Organized efforts to create support for a single all-inclusive law promising equal

rights for persons with disabilities began as Dart issued a report asking Congress to “act

forthwith to include persons with disabilities in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and other civil

and voting rights legislation and regulations” (Pelka, 1997, p. 18). Although that effort

failed, the bill was redrafted by the staffs of Senators Edward Kennedy and Thomas

Harkin, with input fi'om a committee of disability rights attorneys, and representatives

from the White House, Department of Justice and Senator Robert Dole. Efforts to gain

support for the bill included organizational lobbying and individual grass roots campaigns.

President George Bush signed the ADA into law on July 26, 1990.

Although passage of the law brought some disillusionment fi"om those impatient to

see an immediate change in societal behavior, the ADA “has made disability rights

a part of the national agenda and has raised people with disabilities to full

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citizenship under the law for the first time in American history” (Pelka, 1997, p.

22).

Cultural Views: Media Images and Narrative

Incomplete public images, misrepresenting and discounting disability are found in

every arena of information dissemination. Ransom (1996) concludes that “a combination

of liberal pluralism and Marxist explanations is a better option for explaining and

predicting the role of media, than either alone” (p.246).

The liberal pluralism theory of media in American society informs us that media is

a marketplace of competing ideas.. . . Liberal pluralists assume that all audience

members/citizens have equal access to media. [They] also assume that our

educational systems, government, and other public institutions are functioning in

such a way that all citizens are equally motivated to express their ideas and

aspirations in media (p. 241)

Marxist theory, contradictorily, describes mass media as the commonly inaccessible tools

of an elite class who benefit fi-om preserving the status quo.

The pages of children’s literature, comic books, classic literature and film, as well

as mainstream media reporting often capture and perpetuate the cultural misunderstanding

and fear of difference. Disability misrepresentations fall into seven categories, contend

Bogdan and Bilkin, called “handicapist stereotypes” (Nelson, 4). Number one, the

disabled person as pitiable and pathetic, exemplifies fund-raising marathons or telethons.

Number two, the disabled person as supercrip, is the image of someone triumphing over

disability and achieving uncommon success. The third plays on “subtle and deeply held

fears” (Nelson, 1994 p. 6). It is the disabled person as evil, sinister, and criminaL

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demonstrated by the villainous characters in Dr. No and Dr. Straneelove. or the one-

armed killer from the Fugitive. (Nelson, 1994 p. 6). Number four, the “most frightening

of images” recalls eugenics and Third Reich mentalities, is the image of the disabled

person as better off dead. (Nelson, 1994). Media examples are found in three 1980’s

dramas; the movie. Whose Life Is it. Anvwav?. the made-for-television, “An Act of Love,”

and the play Nevis Mountain Dew. All of the plots suggest assisted suicide as a potential

alternative to a life with a disability. The fifth image is the disabled person as maladjusted-

his/her own worst enemy. The common scenario is an able-bodied person redirecting the

attitudes of a person with a disability towards success. One more image is the disabled

person as a burden. This dehumanizing image often exists to demonstrate the virtue of the

caregiver, as in Clara doe in Heidi or Tiny Tim in The Christmas Carol. Finally is the

image of the disabled person as unable to live a successful life. People with disabilities are

rarely seen in film unless they serve a dramatic purpose, unless it’s about them, it’s

without them (Nelson, 1994).

“The Cripple in Literature” asks readers to consider how images of disease and

disability “create society’s conception of the cripple and the cripple’s conception of

himself’ (Kriegal, 1987, p. 33) rather than the artist’s personal impressions of the

experience of being wounded. He adds images of the survivor cripple, and the realistic

cripple to the list of stereotypes. The realistic cripple refers to a character who has

incorporated disability into an overall sense of self, like Laura in Tennessee Williams’ The

Glass Menagerie. The survivor cripple triumphs not over misfortune but against it by

outlasting the effects of his wound until they have been incorporated into his way of

dealing with the world,” (p. 33) as in Saul BeUow’s poolroom entrepreneur, William

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Einhom. Others may cry “I am that I am,” but people with disabilities must submit to the

will of others and whimper “I am what you tell me to be” (p. 34).

The search for role models in literature was the youthful quest and impetus for

Deborah Kent’s chapter, “Disabled Women: Portraits in Fiction and Drama” (1987). She

asks how women with disabilities are viewed by writers, why writers use disabled

characters and suggests that an assessment of the disabled woman’s place in literature is a

barometer and predictor of societal perceptions. Character analyses by Charles Dickens,

James Joyce, Walter de la Mare, Tennessee Williams and others result in theories stating

that the disabled woman is severely disadvantaged in creating and maintaining

interpersonal relationships. Other women see her as different and incapable of sharing their

own “overriding interest in men, and men, when not repulsed, are drawn to her to meet

their unhealthy needs” (Kent, 1987, p. 62).

Comic books both shape and reflect popular opinion, say Tim Lees and Sue Ralph

(1995) in the conference presentation, “Case Studies of Physical Disability in Marvel

Comics, 1961-70.” The authors discuss two characters. Dr. Don Blake and Professor

Xavier, a frail, cane-using character who transforms into his alter ego, Thor, by stamping

his cane on the floor. Professor Xavier, the wheelchair-using mentor of the X-Men, calls

to mind the images of mentally-advanced beings with tiny and feeble bodies. The authors

point out that Xavier represents a mind/body dualism and embodies the stereotypical idea

that if one has disability, he/she must compensate with super achievements in the mental

realm. Both men were portrayed as having unnaturally strong moral characters. The

authors question the portrayal of a good man in a wheelchair. They ask why he can’t

have human flaws. They conclude that while the introduction of disabled characters into

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comic books may have raised the profile of disabled people in a superficial sense, it also

perpetrated many harmful stereotypes (p. 9).

Children’s literature, a powerful tool for teaching and helping children to solve

everyday problems, is another potential spot for damaging stereotypical and limiting

images. Children directed messages often malign the disability experience (Saad,1996). In

“traditional fairy tales, there exists a polarization which equates slowness or

unattractivenesg with evil.” Many times they are helpless and needy (Saad, 1996, p.4).

Even in children’s literature the characters must overcome disability through prayer or

hard work: if a child cannot transcend his/her illness, the implication is that they are

lacking in some way. If they cannot rid themselves of disabilities, the characters often gain

acceptance by becoming heroes. Saad (1996) concludes that ‘children’s literature is a

powerful medium affecting readers’ attitudes,” and so it is imperative that its images of

people with disabilities be positive and realistic (p. 5).

The communication of the disability experience through mainstream entertainment,

literature, and teaching tools is society’s method for creating and regenerating faulty and

profoundly limiting perceptions of disability. The influx of contradictory, reality based

narrative into the existing data updates and shifts ways in which the experience is

perceived and ultimately impacts the experiences of disability itself.

After too long a period of silence, “[t]hose who have been objects of others’

reports are now telling their own stories. As they do so, they define the ethic of our times:

an ethic of voicç, aflfording each a right to speak her own truth, in her own words” (Frank,

1995, p. 9). Exploring the essence of disability fi*om the first person vantage, asking the

question, ‘if I am not my body, then what am I?, becomes fodder for ethnographic

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research. Scholars seeking answers have dissected the disability experience, revealing

ways that the experience affects individuals, community and society.

The Bodv Silent chronicles one man’s journey from having a fully functioning body

to having a severely impaired one. Robert Murphy, an anthropology professor at

Columbia University, remarks on the significance of the relationship between paralysis and

the human condition. “The study of paralysis is a splendid arena for viewing this struggle

of the individual against society, for the disabled are not a breed apart but a metaphor for

the human condition” (Murphy, 1990, p. 5). In the pages of his journal, exploring

euthanasia, isolation, the responsibility of wellness and the costs of illness, he repeatedly

asks the question, “what constitutes living”? As Murphy treks into the unknown, he

draws on his training as a researcher to uncover the secrets of a New World. He recounts

positive feedback from an early edition of his book.

The Body Silent did something for the disabled: It told them that the avoidances

and even outright hostility so often manifested toward them by the non-disabled

are not the natural products of their own physical deficits but, rather, expressions

of deficiencies of perspective and character of those who so behave—in short, it is

their problem, not ours (Murphy, 1990, p.vi).

Feminist writers often include perspectives on embracing the rejected body. “Ideas

of transcending the body have been rejected .. . because they are seen to originate from

philosophies and/or religions that devalue the body (especially women’s bodies) and bodily

experience (Wendell, 1996, p. 165). The British scholar, Jenny Morris applauds the shift

from a medical to a social construction of disability, but cautions that there is a

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tendency within the social model of disability to deny the experience of our own

bodies, insisting that our physical differences and restrictionsentirely are socially

created. While environmental barriers and social attitudes are a crucial part of our

experience of disability - and do indeed disable us - to suggest that this is all there

is to it is to deny the personal experience of physical or

intellectual restrictions, of illness, of the fear of dying. A feminist perspective can

help redress this, and in so doing give voice to the experience of both disabled men

and disabled women (Morris, 1991, p. 10).

Women’s accounts of disability often address limitations as the extent to which they are

unable to serve others. Susan Wendell, a professor of women’s studies in British

Columbia, is not surprised that her “greatest psycho-ethical struggle is with guilt”

(Wendell, 1996, p.5). Internalization of negative images is one way that poor self images

are created. Lonsdale (1990) offers four more reasons why women (although men report

similar fears) with disabilities have a difficult time in social situations. The first reason is

her experience of negative reactions fi-om the outside world. The second is her lack of

control over “normal body fimctions. Next is her need to incorporate cold, hard, metallic

appliances into a warm and soft feminine presence. The fourth reason given is fear of

sexual and social rejection ( p. 66).

The importance of understanding the disability experience, not merely on its own

merits as a cultural diversity, but in terms of its relationship to and its effect on

mainstream culture is emphasized by Cahill and Eggleston (1994) in “Managing Emotions

in Public: The Case of Wheelchair Users”. They contend that the wheelchair users’

emotional management, both personal and other-directed, of public displays supports the

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hypothesis that this aspect of hidden public interaction should be studied so that public life

can be more fully understood. Another study by Braitwaithe (1991) also investigated

disabled-ablebodied social interactions. She reports results about communication from

people with disabilities when they perceive ablebodied persons are expecting or

demanding disclosure about their disabilities. One of the important study findings

questioned “the prescription that persons with disabilities shouldalways disclose about

their disability. While disclosure may make ablebodied people more comfortable,

disclosure may not always be advantageous for the disabled person, either relationally or

personally” (p. 267).

Michael Berube’s (1997) article in The Chronicle of Higher Education asks why

disability is not seen as the potentially universal condition that it is. He claims that

“understanding disability as an integral part of the human condition means imagining

ourselves in their places—and that may be too much of a psychological burden for us to

bear” (p. B5). The author, father to a child with Down syndrome, questions the images of

disability and their relationship to real world situations. Berube suggests the inclusion of

disabilities studies in college anthropology, history, and literature courses: “If we bring

those perspectives to bear on the humanities, perhaps we will understand humanity.

Perhaps, too, if we are fortunate, we can help to create a political climate in which all

persons with disabilities are recognized and valued, even if they’re not as charming as

Forrest Gump or as heroic as Billy Bob Thornton’s Karl (from the movie Slingblade)” (p.

B5).

The discipline of Communication studies is another area of disability research.

Thompson’s “The Way We Were,” (1997) asserts that “(d)isability is socially constructed

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as a defining characteristic of an individual” (p. 8). She documents her search for a

discipline that would fully support her own interest in disability studies through special

education, symbolic-interaction sociology, and communication.

Haller (1997) notes that “in the 1990’s little research has focused how local media

can more often and more accurately cover the disability community and disability issues”

(p. 4). She reports that two possible positive media images for people with disabilities are

(1) “the minority group model, in which the disability community is seen as deserving of

civil rights and (2) the consumer model, in which equity in society for people with

disabilities in society is seen as good economic sense” (p. 10). Affirming the power of the

media in the social construction of disability, she implores communication scholars to

focus on “assessing this potential change” (p. 12).

As a disability culture emerged, those living with “biological defects that cannot

be cured and that inhibit, to some extent, their ability to perform certain functions”

(Ingstad, 1995, p. ix) express their own views of society and of themselves. Their rage

against political policies, societal misconceptions and medical model language, all defining,

incorrectly, the disability experience, produced a result greater than each individual

success.

Constructing and Deconstructing Disabilitv: Medical and Social Models

The way that disability is understood is as central to the disability experience as is

the nature of the contracted impairment. Recent years have seen shifts in consciousness

surrounding the epistemological and ontological contexts of disability. Previously,

disability was seen as an individual or medical problem focused on a body that worked (or

didn’t) differently, more weakly, or chronically less able than expected.

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The decision to assign medical meaningsdisability to has had many and varied

consequences for disabled people. One clear benefit has been the medical

treatments that have increased the well-being and vitality of many disabled people,

indeed have saved many people’s lives.. .. Yet, along with these benefits, there

are enormous negative consequences. .. . Briefly, the medicalization of disability

casts human variation as deviance firom the norm, as pathological condition, as

deficit, and, significantly, as an individual burden and personal tragedy. Society, in

agreeing to assign medical meaning disability,to colludes to keep the issue within

the purview of the medical establishment, to keep it a personal matter and “treat”

the condition and the person with the condition rather than “treating” the social

processes and policies that constrict disabled people’s lives (Linton, 1998, p. 11).

Currently, disability is recognized as a social or community problem, the

environmental, social, and political barriers are seen essential determinants of handicap.

Without a conception of disability as a social construct, explanations of the results

of modem “disability legislation” are incomplete. What is not accounted for is the

fact that laws that deal with handicapped people reflect not only the political

problems posed by conflicting interest groups, but also the views that biological

deficiency confers social deficiency... . Useful legislative evaluations need to take

into account the processes by which people who deviate fi’om accepted physical

norms are devaluated and segregated, and, as a result, disabled (Liachowitz, 1988,

p.l).

The changes have been reflected in social and personal experience, in legislation,

and in language use.

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The present examination of disability has no need for the medical language of

symptoms and diagnostic categories. Disability studies looks to different kinds of

syndromes for its material. The elements of interest here are the linguistic

conventions that structure the meaning assigned to disability and the patterns of

response to disability that emanate from, or are attendant upon, those meanings

There are various consequences of the chosen terminology and variation in

the degree of cpntrol that the named group has over the labeling process (Linton,

1998, p. 8,10).

Recognizing a common community voice. Barton (1996) contends

Disabled people are increasingly involved in challenging stereotypes and

developing an alternative dignified perspective, one which recognizes disability as a

human rights issue. This involves the struggle for choice, social justice and

participation. The voices of disabled people are unmistakably clear on these issues

(p. 13).

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METHODOLOGY

Without having much background information about the social and historical

conditions of disability or without a lengthy discussion of Karl Marx’s theories of

historical materialism, it would stUl be easy to identify a comfortable match between

disability oppression and Marxist theory. Because people with disabilities comprise an

underprivileged class easily defined by their uneasy relationship to the economic

relationships of society, the mode of production, and because Marx names social

inequality as a class-bound, economic fact of society, Marxism places the origination of

disability oppression in that economic dysfunction. The lumpenproletariat, an arguably

suitable description for the class of people with disabilities, is Marx’s name for a class

even more disenfi-anchised than factory workers. This class of people exists outside

socially acceptable modes of production. They are the gypsies, the beggars, and the

unemployed. Of oppressed peoples, they are the most oppressed. To locate

empowerment, though, not instead of, but evolving fi-om, generations of persecution, one

must consider the social implications suggested by Marx’s theory of internal relations.

Marxist theory suggests a world view in which distinct organizations and the

relationships supporting them function independently and interdependently simultaneously.

28

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No process and no relationship exists prior to or independently from any other

process or relationship. Each process exists, literally, as the site of all the other

processes in society. Each process also contributes in part to the existence of all

the other processes in society. This reciprocal, multisided, causality, or mutual

constitution, is what Resnick and Wolff refer to as overdetermination. As each

process is uniquely constituted by its particular determination, it moves in a

complex and contradictory manner. That is to say, as one process changes, so too

do all the others, and therefore any one process is in a constant, non-teleological

flux, overdetermined time and again by the continual, contradictory movement of

its conditions of existence (processes) (Wolff 1996, pp. 145-6).

Accepting this irreducible aggregate as essential, Marx describes a present contained in the

womb of the past, a society with factors as coimected as the sections of any Rube

Goldberg contraption. Empowerment grows from the ashes of Ed Roberts, Helen Keller,

and Wade Blank; from the pens of John Callahan, Nancy Mairs, and Mary Johnson; from

the legislative power of the ADA, the Fair Housing Act and ADAPT; and from the

scholarly efforts of Simi Linton, David Pfieffer, and Paul Longmere.' This chapter not only

explores previous literature describing the use of Marxism to understand the oppression of

disability, but also looks more closely at Marx’s application of the theory of internal

relations (which can be traced to Hegel, Spinoza, and even Aristotle) and its implications

' All these people and organizations represent disability empowerment: Ed Roberts (1939-1995) is called the father of the independent living movement; Helen Keller (1880-1968) was deaf and blind, insisting on equality in a time when either condition guaranteed exclusion; Wade Blank (1940-1993) was an ADAPT founder who recognized a need after his experience as a nursing home attendant; John Callahan is a cartoonist who’s s irreverent humor asks us to look past the expected; Nancy Mairs’ book and essays are personal and poetic observations into the disability experience; Mary Johnson is the editor of The Ragged Edge: Linton, Pfieffer, and Longmere are writers and educators.

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for the disability community. Additionally, it proposes the structure of disability

empowerment and clarifies the purpose of disability press messages.

Oppression

Historically, oppression has been addressed by submerged groups seeking

resolution. Women’s struggles with economic, political and social inequality have

provided insight to the newer civil rights battle of the disability community. Although

some women found the match between Marxism and feminism unsatisfactory for its lack

of gender specificity, “Marxism systematically explained people’s oppression, provided a

“scientific” understanding of historical change, and offered a vision of a truly just society

in which equality, realization of human potential, and the true fulfillment of people’s needs

were ingredient” (Philipson & Hansen, 1990, p. 12). But, in spite of the lack of specific

references to gender issues, there is room within Marxist theoiy to root out the oppression

of women.

Job segregation . . . is the primary mechanism in capitalist society that maintains

the superiority of men over women, because it enforces lower wages for women in

the labor market. Low wages keep women dependent on men because they

encourage women to marry. Married women must perform domestic chores for

their husbands. Men benefit, then, fi-om both higher wages and the domestic

division of labor (Hartmann, 1976, p. 148).

Just as the women’s movement did, the disability rights movement recognizes the

value of utilizing Marxist theory as an appropriate structure for understanding conditions

of inequality. Disability studies scholars, many of them British, have placed the

underpinnings of disability oppression within a Marxian system of economic emphasis.

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Bames (1997) names two possible explanations for the phenomena of negative public

attitudes towards people with disabilities.

The first, and the older of the two, suggests that cultural perceptions of

impairment are shaped by deep rooted psychological fears of the abnormal and the

unknown. The second, explains disabled people’s oppression in term of material

considerations such as the economy and the way that it is organised or what is

sometimes termed the mode o f production (p. 2).

Bames identifies disability oppression as a product of industrial capitalism by recognizing

how the politicization and medicalization of disability affects perceptions. Since people

with disabilities are often excluded fi-om systems of commodity production and

distribution, they are incorporated into a second medically and politically based system

based on perception of need. These systems are covertly designed to keep the

underprivileged in an unemployed state so that others can maintain employment. Bames

(1997) cites a 1966 study which claims that “because of the centrality of work in westem

culture [people with disabilities] are viewed as useless since they are considered not able

to contribute to the economic good o f the community” (p. 5). Bames concludes by

suggesting that changes in the value systems within westem society must precede the full

inclusion of disabled people into mainstream society.

A related study explores the implications of the disabled person’s nonproductivity.

The findings show that

the ability to labour in some socially recognized sense still seems a requirement of

fiiU membership of a future good society based upon Marxist theory.. . . It is hard

to see how despite all efforts by a benign social stmcture an albeit small group of

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impaired people could achieve full social integration. Following Marxist theory . ..

some impaired lives cannot. . . be truly social, since the individual is deprived of

the possibility of those satisfactions and that social membership to which her

humanity entitles her, and which only work can provide. . .. There is then for

Marxism an identity o f who you are with the work you do which transcends

capitalism and socialism into the concrete utopia of the future to constitute key

element of humanity, and a key need of human beings in all eras (Abberly, 1998, p.

187).

Oliver (1996) asserts that Marx can be essential to an ontological understanding of

disability. He suggests the nature of the connection between work, work relationships and

disability images. Since

all phenomena (including social categories) are produced by the economic and

social forces of capitalism, the forms in which they are produced are ultimately

dependent upon their relationship to the economy ( Marx, 1913). Hence, the

economy, through both the operation of the labour market, and the social

organisation of work, plays a key role in determining societal responses . . . to

disability.. . (p. 131, 132).

In an earlier work. The Politics of Disablement. Oliver (1990) devotes a chapter,

“Disability and the Rise of Capitalism,” to a discussion of conditions and contributing

economic factors of the disability experience. He claims that “a framework derived from

historical materialism does. .. add to our understanding of what happened to disabled

people with the coming of industrial society” (p.26). The author states that “historical

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materialism is not just about placing social relationships within a historical setting. It also

attempts to provide an evolutionary perspective on the whole of human history” (p.27).

Oliver turns his discussion to disability empowerment by referencing Marx’s views

of society to support his own theory that man is a totally social being and without society

he does not exist. He claims that empowerment is “a collective process on which the

powerless embark as part of the struggle to resist the oppression of others, as part of their

demands to be ipcluded, and/or to articulate their own views of the world” (1996, p. 147).

Oliver names components of the empowerment transformation as

the rise in the number of organizations controlled by and for disabled people, the

number of groups still emerging to represent the community, the challenge to

mainstream social perceptions of disability as personal tragedy, and the affirmation

of positive images of disability through the development of a politics of personal

identity (p. 152).

Supporting his claim of Marx’s belief in the unity of human consciousness, the author

offers the following quote from Marx:

Though man is a unique individual - and it is just his particularity which makes him

an individual, a really individual social being - he is equally the whole, the

subjective existence of society as thought and experienced. He exists in reality, as

the representation and real mind of social existence, and as the sum of human

manifestation of life (p. 155).

Taken in conjunction with the claim of unity among man, Marx’s concept of the

interdependent nature of social institutions explains the rise in disability empowerment

over the past ten years since the passage of the ADA. Marx’s theory of internal relations

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suggests that no one system (family, law, education, ideological representation [mass

media], or cultural phenomena) is independent of the rest. But, instead, each is nudged by

the other’s movement. If human progress and institutional change are intimately

connected, then it follows that the separate, progressive movements combine to create

something new in human consciousness. Increased awareness results from changes to

legislation (the ADA), health care practices, (home care as a viable alternative to

institutionalization), activist organizations (ADAPT and disability-managed Centers for

Independent Living), educational mainstreaming and the legitimatization of disability

studies programs. Increased awareness, enables, or perhaps, forces the existence of

empowerment.

Internal Relations And Empowerment

Philosophers since the Greek Parmenides have suggested a theory of internal

relations or holism to postulate the nature of existence. Its prominence in the modem

period, though, can be attributed to Spinoza.

Spinoza’s own version of this philosophy is constructed upon Aristotle’s

definition of “substance” as that which is capable of independent existence. Since

only nature taken as a whole is capable of independent existence, it is, according to

this view, the sole substance. It is such a unified nature which Spinoza labels

‘God’. . . . Leibniz, on the other hand, puts his emphasis on the parts and devotes

little attention to the whole he sees reflected in each.. . . Coming a century later,

Hegel was perhaps the first to work through the main implications of the

philosophy of internal relations and to construct in some detail the total system

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which it implied. In this he was aided . . . by the character of the impasse

bequeathed to him by his immediate predecessor, Kant (Oilman, p. 30-31).

Essentially, the theory explains an interconnection between apparently unrelated

concepts and occurrences.

The problem of internal relations . .. may be put very simply. Let us say that A is

related to B. If the absence of that relation would leave A as it was, the relation is

external. If, when, the relation was absent, A would be different, or would cease to

be, the relation is internal (Blanchard, 1989, p.3).

Blanchard goes on to name four characteristics of internal relations. He states first that

each individual factor will “overlap with other members of the whole to which they

belong.. . . Secondly, terms that are internally related must stand in a continuum” (p. 12).

A continuum usually has a spatial relationship, but not necessarily in terms of an internal

relations theory, so that even non touching daisies in a field of daisies could be be

considered to be internally related. Blanchard continues, “[tjhirdly, between the terms

related in the continuum there must be difference of degree... [as are] the system of

colors displayed in the spectrum . . . [and] [fourthly internal relations cannot be dealt with

by formal logic” (p. 12-13).

Marx And Internal Relations

Understanding Marx’s use of this theory to explain an economic base and social

superstructure as social praxis and not merely as an affirmation of a finance-driven

universe, the implications of unity in seemingly unrelated events, social movements, and

man’s behaviors is profound.

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In other words, when Marx says “The mode of production of material life

determines the social, political, and intellectual process in general,” we must try to

understand this claim in a way that allows the latter group of factors to vitally

affect the mode of production, and in a way that removes the automatic

dependence of the social superstructure on the economic base. We must do this,

because this is how Marx used his theories in practise (Oilman, 1976, p.9).

The way thqt each factor relates to the others is as an entity, which, even though

independent, can not be considered in isolation.

The ties between [the social relations] are contingent rather than necessary; they

could be something very different without affecting the vital character of the

factors involved. .. such relations are internal to each factor (they are ontological

relations), so that when an important one alters, the fector itself alters; it becomes

something else (Oilman, 1976, p. 15)

Not only are different social factors intimately connected to each other, but fectors are

united through time. “To introduce the temporal dimension . . . we need only view each

social factor as internally related to its own past and future forms, as well as to the past

and future forms of surrounding factors.... Tomorrow is today extended (Oilman,

1976, p. 18). Marx claims that man

does not see how the sensuous world around him is, not a thing given direct from

all eternity, ever the same, but the product of industry and of the state of society;

and, indeed, in the sense that it is an historical product, the result of the activity if a

whole succession of generations, each standing on the shoulders of the preceding

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one, developing its industry and its intercourse, modifying its social organization

according to the changed needs. (Marx & Engels, 1846, p.35)

The ethereal and ubiquitous character of internal relations exists to connect

seemingly unrelated factors and events into something new. Legislation, ethnography, and

the creation of human rights and service organizations exist together through time and

individual intent: “Thus, the book before me expresses and therefore .. .relationally

contains everything from the fact that there is a light on in my room to the social practice

and institutions of my society that made this particular work possible” (Oilman, 1976,

p27). These events, then, coexist to create community awareness. That awareness is the

state of mind leading to revolution.

When people speak of ideas that revolutionize society, they do but express the

fact, that within the old society, the elements of a new one have been created, and

that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps even pace with the dissolution of

conditions of existence. (Marx & Engels, 1847, p. 174)

The awareness of imposed oppression inspires social and political change. “ [0]nly when

[man] has recognized and organized his own powerssocial as powers so that social force

is no longer separated from him aspolitical power, only then is human emancipation

complete” (Marx, 1843, p. 21). This revolution is an ideological one. Empowerment

equals knowledge of equality. As the wheelchair bumper sticker demands: “To go where

everyone has gone before”.

Empowerment And The Disability Press

The images and rhetoric of the disability press characterize the disability

experience as it is and not as it is believed to be through oppressive societal filters.

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Clusters of concepts are identified by naming the major issues of the disability community:

fi-eedom, deinstitutionalization, and equality. These concepts tell the story of reaction to a

pervasive oppression.

There are. Nelson (1996) claims, five primary needs of the disability community

that are only satisfied by the internal press: (I) The press gives recognition to the salience

of disability issues; (2) It sets the standard for sensitivity in covering disability issues; (3) It

provides coverage that is easily received by the target group; (4) It can provide

community members with a sense of identity; (5)It is a forum and a rallying point in

support of civil action activities (p. 6).

Other oppressed minorities have used an internal press to spread their message and

unite their members.

What allowed socialist-feminist ideas to spread across the country as they did was

an underground circulation of papers, articles, and pamphlets that were

mimeographed or printed at the author’s expense or as a project of a socialist-

feminist group or organization (Hansen & Philipson, 1990, p. 10).

Sometimes those messages are in the form of movement rhetoric, visual art, or fi-om

community-driven press. “ These organs provided an identity to their movements and a

core rallying point for their adherents” (Nelson, 1996, p. 7).

Two unrelated, yet relevant, studies set precedent for the way that the current

exploration addresses media images in relationship to group empowerment. Foss (1996)

studies women’s empowerment by focusing on “the process by which women come to see

their symbols, rituals, and regular practices—the content of their experiences that tends to

be overlooked the [dominant] worldview—as legitimate” ( p. 205). She examines visual

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art for the “discursive and nondiscursive data of words, colors, lines, textures, and

images—it may reveal strategies that would not be apparent in a work of discursive

rhetoric alone (p. 206). By noticing the qualities of individual sections and general

characteristics of a room-sized work of art, she recognizes the uniquely feminine

perspective of the work. The author claims that

[ajnalysis of The Dinner Party (the artwork) reveals three primary strategies used

in the work as a means to empower and legitimize women’s authentic voice: (a)

The work is independent from male-created reality; (b) it creates new standards for

evaluation of its own rhetoric; and (c) women are clearly labeled as agents (p.211).

The author claims that with the predomination of female imagery and the lack of

reference to anything male the work “defines women’s culture as derived from women’s

positive experiences rather than in opposition to men’s culture (Foss, 1996, p. 211). The

artwork does for the women’s community what the disability press does for its

community: it presents an alternative vision on its own terms. Foss (1996) recognizes

another value of submerged groups discovering and legitimizing their voice. She claims

they make possible the development of generative theory, displacing stereotype and asking

the viewer to question accepted practices and beliefs. She suggests that “[w]hen we

develop generative theory, as the study of submerged rhetoric encourages, we will have

the satisfaction of knowing that we have not necessarily or unjustly constructed our

inquiry by neglecting alternative views of understanding” ( p. 219).

The rhetoric of minority communities can be analyzed for information about the

stages of growth of the attendant social movement. The second study recognizes how

dominant rhetorical concepts capture and direct internal sentiment. Darcey (1991) tracks

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the emergence of gay pride as a social movement by defining catalytic events that divide

his area of study into conceptually distinct eras. He also names the dominant value appeals

fi-om each of the rhetorical periods he examines. Unity, work, determination, and strength,

achievement, truthfulness, justice, safety and security, and tolerance are the categories he

names. The Defending Fragile Achievements era, the Fortifying Against a Conservative

Tide era and finally the AIDS—Battling the Hydra era are examples of names he gives to

the stages of the gay pride movement (Darcey, 1991).

Groups existing outside society’s mainstream are, nonetheless, subject to

pressures of the dominant group’s images. Recognizing those images as conceived, rather

than natural, is a step towards empowerment. The way that people with disabilities appear,

to themselves and in their circles of existence is influenced by those imposed images. The

dominating opinions generated by years of misrepresentation are absolutely unavoidable.

“Hegemony is dijSuse and appears everywhere as natural. It (re)enforces domination not

only through the (armed) state but also throughout society. The impulses and impressions,

beliefs and values, standards and manners are projected more like sunlight” (Charlton,

1998, p.31). A crucial concept of oppression, according to Marx (1846), is the way in

which the ruling class controls the ideas of the times.

In every epoch the ideas of the ruling class are the ruling ideas, that is, the class

that is the ruling material power of society is at the same time the ruling

intellectual power. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of

the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas, hence of the relationships

which make the one class the ruling one and therefore the ideas of its domination

(p. 89).

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Berger (1982) claims that “[t]he ruling class, according to this theory, propagates an

ideology that justifies its status and makes it difficult for the ordinary people to recognize

that they are bejng exploited and victimized... . The ideas people have are the ideas the

ruling class wants people to have” (p. 50).

The mass media broadcasts the images that serves the purpose of the dominant

power, “it [mass media] still performs [the] job of distracting people fi-om the realities of

our society and of “clouding their minds” with ideas that the ruling class wishes them to

have (p. 54). Alternatively, group media represents self-defined reality. Empowering

images and rhetoric in the disability press exist as counter attacks to false images and

mistaken identities.

Berger (1982) claims that “Marxist thought is one of the most powerful and

suggestive ways available to the media analyst for analyzing society and its institutions”

(p. 44). He suggests five areas of inspection for traditional Marxist analysis of the media.

This study individualizes those areas and suggests three questions be addressed:

(1) What social, political and economic arrangements characterize the disability

community?

(2) Who owns, controls, and operates the publications?

(3) Which concepts and values are being forwarded by the press?

This study wUl look at the categories that define resistance to stereotypical

images propagafed about people with disabilities. These categories; unity, strength,

independence and fi-eedom and sexuality, defy the limiting images of people with

disabilities as pitiable, childlike, helpless and asexual. By inspecting four covers and four

cover stories each of Mainstream. New Mobility. Ragged Edge and Mouth Magazines it

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can be determined what the messages of empowerment are. The effects of empowering

messages can be seen in rising employment rates, increased earnings, and increased

community involvement by people with disabilities. “[M]arxist media analysis [has] a great

deal of appeal—especially to people with a strong sense of social justice and desires for a

more egalitarian , more humane world” (Berger, 1982, p. 64). Using Marxism as a

structure to understand oppression and as a canopy to explain empowerment, this paper’s

methodology is appropriate for a community presenting humanitarian value and right

action as the primary appeals for equality.

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ANALYSIS

Empowerment in The Disability Press

The Random House Webster’s College Dictionarvn991) provides two definitions for

the verb ‘empower’: 1. to give official or legal power or authority to. 2. to endow with an

ability; enable (p. 438). Roget’s Thesaurus (1992) lists four synonyms for the noun

‘empowerment’: enablement, investment, enfi-anchisement, and endowment (p. 19). Feminine

scholarship recognizes that feminism or feminine empowerment

occurs as and when women, individually and together, hesitantly and rampantly,

joyously and with deep sorrow, come to see our lives differently and to reject

externally imposed fixâmes of reference for understanding these lives, instead beginning

the slow process of constructing our own ways o f seeing them, understanding them,

and living them. For us, the insistence on the deeply political nature of everyday life

and on seeing political change as personal change, is quite simply, feminism (Stanley &

Wise, 1983, p. 192).

Over a century ago, W. E. DuBois (1950) envisioned integration as the Black

community’s path to social equality. He believed that “unless a human being is going to have

all human rights, including not only work, but fiiendship, and if mutually desired, marriage and

children, unless these avenues are open and fi'ee, there cap be no real equality and no cultural

43

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integration” (p.220). The disability community is in the process of defining empowerment in

its own terms. The messages in disability press may clarify how this sea change will

materialize.

In order to analyze the messages of the disability press, this study targets four issues

fi’om each of four magazines. Selections are fi-om the 1997-98 issues of Mouth ('MOI.

Mainstream CMAI. New Mobility (NM). and Ragged Edge fRET In the case of Ragged Edge

and Mouth, the four issues represent a full year’s volume. New Mobility and Mainstream are

monthlies. The feature stories are classified as personal or political and then subdivided into

one of three subcategories based on the most fi-equently appearing themes. Finally, selected

stories and covers are individually analyzed.

Each of these publications, written by and for the people of the disability community,

expresses the disability experience uniquely through the images they present and the

accompanying rhetoric. Both Mouth and New Mobility Magazines began publishing the year

that the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) passed in 1990. But by that time. The

Disability Rag, precursor of the Ragged Edge, had been in print for ten years. The Disability

Rag modified its rabble-rousing focus, changed names and transformed into The Ragged Edge

in 1997. Mainstream began publishing in 1988 and released its last issue in December, 1998.

Presently, Mouth: Voice of the Disability Nation plays the role of community

conscience, with an unrelenting, demanding and angry voice. The Ragged Edge: The

Disability Experience in America has become an opinion journal, similar to Mouth, but

features the fiction and poetry of writers with disabilities. Mainstream: Magazine of the Able-

Disabled and New Mobility: Disability Culture and Lifestyle, cover news and current affairs,

with an emphasis on lifestyle. While Ragged Edge and Mouth are available by subscription

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only, have no ads and are printed on plain paper. Mainstream’s and New Mobility’s

circulations number more than 20,000 including promotional subscriptions, advertisements

and glossy, full color formats.

Advertising significantly affects each magazine’s content. Two journals. New Mobility

and Mainstream, capitalize on advertising income by producing mainstream quality products.

They are attractively packaged, highly circulated, and represent a veritable but not angry

awareness of disability. The other two. Ragged Edge and Mouth, present a dissatisfied,

rousing, and in-your-face glimpse of the disability experience. Although each of the magazines

offers both social and political views of oppression and inequality, the use of advertising by

Mainstream and New Mobility necessarily softens the message and the hard, political edge

offered by Ragged Edge and Mouth. According to Berger:

One thing that advertising does is to divert people’s attention fi-om social and political

concerns into narcissistic and private concerns. The immediate mission is to sell goods;

the long-range mission is to maintain the class system. In order to sell goods,

advertising has to change attitudes, lifestyles, habits, customs, and preferences while at

the same time maintaining the economic system that benefits fi^om these changes.

(1982, p. 58).

All four magazines of the disability press ask readers to think alternatively. Mouth and

Ragged Edge make several statements by choosing alternative funding. These quarterlies

“transform the rhetoric of revolution into the advocacy of [a] specific cause” (Heartney, 1996,

p. 7). They not only retain editorial fi-eedom, but demonstrate community cohesion by

soliciting funds fi-om subscribers. Advertisements appearing in New Mobüitv and Mainstream

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are relevant, respectful, and occasionally controversial' (NM 8/96, 10/96). Still, they sell a

belief system along with the wheelchair. Using persuasion techniques, advertising’s aim is

intentional. Berger says, “advertising leads people to . . . separate themselves from one

another, it imposes upon them a collective form of taste” (p. 5 6). Ads may respect a disabled

consumer’s physical status, yet insult her feminist awareness.^ Alternative, controversial, and

diverse, the disability press exposes its readers to information that creates awareness,

promoting empowerment.

The Messages

The messages of the press demand equality, independence, and suggest new concepts

of disability. Equality of people with disabilities is a state existing, at times, only in the ideal

and available only as glimpsed through unsuccessful attempts to claim what should be human

rights. The stories report what is and describe what should be. The images are provoking and

honest.

After identifying all the titles, two categories were immediately obvious: the personal

(relating to self or group as individuals) and the political (relating to self or group as

community). Each of these categories is further defined by three subdivisions that serve to

clarify focal points. Political subcategories are ones containing articles that address fighting

the system, social equality/ community challenge, and accessibility; personal ones are lifestyle,

equipment, and personal triumph. Highlighting a need for systemic change and collective

awareness, political messages are a call to action and are persuasive in nature. Personal stories

'New Mobility has printed ads of a partially dressed pregnant woman in a wheelchair and a disabled man lying in a bed with an able bodied woman. ^ New Mobility ran an ad that featured a man in a wheelchair cavorting with a stereotypically “sexy” woman. Although the point was that people in wheelchairs can have fun, expressing an alternative concept, the ad design employed anti feminist concepts..

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offer informative, sometimes exemplary accounts about the experience of living with a

disability. The following table sorts the feature stories of selected issues into these six

categories.

Political

Fighting the Svstem

Fighting the system is easily the category with the most entries. There are 28 entries

appearing here, but only 15 titles in lifestyle, the next largest division. The stories describe

existing unfairness and catalog attempts to change the institutions responsible for the

inequality. The language used is confrontive as in the following titles from Mouth: the

September, October, 1997 issue contained the stories “Disability Nation Declares

Independence From Institutions”, “Nursing Home Operators Rush To Prevent Mass Escape

From Their Prisons”, and “The Real War Has Begun-Enlist Here To Fight For Your

Freedom”. The July/August, 1998 issue featured “Prisoners Of Medicaid Demand Freedom”.

“Justice Denied By Workers’ Comp”appeared in the May/June, 1998 issue. The Ragged Edge

also promotes tfie political: as in the May/June 1998 issue, “The National Association of

Home Builders is our number-one enemy”(p. 13), “The Tactics of Survival” (p. 18), and from

July/August, “Universal Design: Still fighting for respect”.

1. [RE] Living In The Past: The National Association Of Home Builders Takes

On All Comers In Its Unrelenting Fight Against Building Homes All Of Us Can Enter

2. [RE] The department ofjustice and us

3. [RE] Some reflections on the ADA

4. [RE] Pro Se? Nothing to it—how to file your own lawsuit without a lawyer

5. [RE] Beyond Sticks ‘n’ Stones

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6. [RE} Satyagraha And Disability Rights

7. [RE] A Billion Of Us By 2000

8. [Mo] Disability Nation Declares Independence From Institutions

9. [Mo] ADAPT Takes Nation’s Capital By Storm

10. [Mo] Gingrich Introduces Mi CASA-The Medicaid Community Attendant

Services Act

11. [Mo] Clinton ADAPT Summit Scheduled For September 10 At The White

House

12. [Mo] NCIL, Self-Advocates, Justice For AH, N.O.W.-AU Unite With

ADAPT

13. [Mo] Nursing Home Operators Rush To Prevent Mass Escape From Their

prisons

14. [Mo] The Real War Has Begun-Enlist Here To Fight For Your Freedom

15. [Mo] The Department: “there’s A Street In Itta Bena CaUed Freedom.

There’s A Town In Mississippi CaUed Liberty. And There’s A Department In Washington

CaUed Justice.”- a saying among civil rights workers in Mississippi, 1964

16. [Mo] De-Coding The DOJ’s Documents

17. [Mo] Justice Denied By Workers’ Comp

18. [Mo] Prisoners Of Medicaid Demand Freedom

19. [Mo] ADAPT Takes Memphis

20. [Mo] NCIL Adapts DC

21. [Mo] Cuomo Surrenders HUD

22. [Mo] A Mother Calls For IDEA Police

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23. [Mo] Let them in: how parents can educate their neighborhood schools

24. [Mo] Let them skip school

25. [Mo] Docs Unmask Managed Care

26. [NM] Homeward Bound - attendant care and Medicaid

27. [NM] International Rights, Wrongs and Remedies

28. [Ma] The Litigators - disability rights

Social Equality/ Community Challenge

The social equality/ community challenge subdivision stories asks readers to pay

attention to issqes that have significant impact on the daily lives and possibilities for the

disability community (Social equality division #s 2, 4, 7, 10). It is notable that Ma has only

one entry in this subdivision. The issues reveal the community’s value concerns: the moral

(#’sl, 2, 3), the legal (#8), the social (# 4, 5, 10, 11).

1. [RE] Not Dead Yet’s Unique Message

2. [RE[ The Bad Baby Blues: Reproductive Technology & The Threat To

Diversity

3. [RE] Guinea pigs don’t get to say no

4. [RE] Commission on civil rights raps media coverage of the ADA

5. [Mo] The Fire That WiU Not Go Out : Hey, Everybody...This Movement Is

Moving!

6. [Mo] Not Dead Yet Crashes Hemlock

7. [Mo] Preventing kids like us

8. [NM] Medical Marijuana

9. [NM] Crip Caste - the disability community's pecking order

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1 G. [NM] The Ultimate Offense - language

11. [NM] Top 10 U.S. Cities

Accessibility

Accessibility is a primary concern for the disability community. This issue is examined

from both political and personal viewpoints. This issue conceivably fits in either the systems

(#2) or social (#1) subdivision, but stands alone in order to demonstrate the scope of the

topic.

1. [Mo] Greyhound: We Will Ride!- Or Will We?

2. [RE] Design for the 21" century starts now

Personal

Lifestyle

These stories address the issues that impact the personal lives of people with

disabilities as individuals. Issues like childhood experience (#11), employment (#1, 2), home

design (#3,10), body and relationship issues for men (#11) and for women (#4, 5) as well as

options for recreation (#6, 7, 12), sports (#8) and practical information (#9). As expected NM

had the largest percentage of entries in this subdivision, or 66%.

1. [NM] Self - Employed

2. [NM] Finding Work

3. [NM] Designing for Freedom redesign your home

4. [NM] Body Image, Self-Esteem, Relationships, Domestic Violence, Feminism

5. [NM] Women's Health - information from a disabled Ob/Gyn

6. [NM] The World Series of Poker

7. [NM] Soap Doc Mitch Longley

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8. [NM] Skiing: Choices Slopes, Sweet Deals

9. [NM] Mac vs. Windows

10. [Ma] Accessible Housing

11. [Ma] Reimagining Manhood

12. [Ma] The gifted gardener

Health/ Equipment

Maneuvering the demands of an imperfectly ftmctioning body is a requirement for

empowerment. Knowing what equipment (#1,2,7) will facilitate comfort or expand personal

effectiveness is essential. The information her ranges from necessary ( #1,7, 8) to whimsical

(#3)

1. [NM] Cushions

2. [NM] Leak Proofing - incontinence

3. [NM] Dogs on Wheels

4. [NM] Standing Chairs

5. [Ma] A question of balance - seating systems

6. [Ma] Cath Controversy

7. [Ma] Cover - woman in wheelchair saying "I'll make that call"

8. [Ma] Days of whine and noses - Braille wine bottles

9. [Ma] Talking communication - services and equipment

Personal Triumph

One of the offending stereotypical misconceptions of disability is that merely

performing everyday tasks is somehow noteworthy because of perceived difficulty. In the

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disability press, stories of personal triumph are told about those who make a difference,

not only in their own lives, but in the lives of those around them (#2, 3, 5, 7).

1 [Mo] Meet Our Homegrown ADA Enforcers

2. [Mo] Billy Golfus Launches Telethon

3. [NM] Marilyn Hamilton

4. [RE} Fiction: Epilepsy Poster Child

5. [Ma] Edge wise guy John Hockenbeny

6. [Ma] Missing Andy

7. [Ma] Transforming her world —Nancy Mairs

8. [Ma] Cover - man in wheelchair on beach - "Inspirational'

Summarv

There were seventy stories offered by the four magazines. The breakdown is as

follows:

Political stories 41 58.6%

Changing the system 28

Social Equality 11

Accessibility 2

Personal stories 29 41.4%

Lifestyle 12

Health/ equipment 9

Personal Triumph 8

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Story Analysis

The articles listed in the political section, almost 59%, draw attention to common threads

of experience that describe condition of disability. Many of the articles in the personal section

also capture common threads, but omit the rhetoric that holds the system responsible for

injustice. Mouth leads all the publications in the number of political articles printed. Unlike the

other issues, there is no blend of personal and political perspectives. Their stories are

exclusively political. Ragged Edge also recommends political thought to their readers: the

November/December, 1998 issue claimed that “books that go beyond the personal into the

political experience of disability are still harder to find than they ought to be” (p. 21). The

stories are alarming as they report injustice and mistreatment. In Guinea pigs don’t get to say

‘no’, Ervin (1998)compares dangerous drug research involving “decisionally incapacitated”

subjects to the 1930's Tuskegee incident, involving black men and syphilis treatment. New

Mobility’s articles are less political in tone and in number than personal and Mainstream’s are

even less so. Barry Corbet, the editor of New Mobility, often includes a political theme m

“Bully Pulpit”, the editor’s column. Mainstream published the last issue in December of 1998

before discontinuing publication.

“ Lifting Liberty”, one of the pages included with political story # 8 “Disability Nation

Declares Independence From Institutions,” is an example of the angry, confrontive style for

which Mouth Magazine is known. Author, Lucy G win, analogizes nursing homes and the

Berlin Wall. She writes about automatic Health Care Financial Administration expenditures,

“Sometimes it takes a year or more to bring one hostage out and help her or help him to

connect with life in the free world. Two million people with disabilities are hostages behind it.

America pays the $70 billion annual ransom without blinking”(Gwin, 1997, p. 14). The

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subtitle of the story, “Enemies of our liberty are wealthy, powerful”, recognizes conflict and

antagonism between a disabled “us” and an indoctrinated “them”. Each paragraph employs

war terminology to state a case. Freedom, captivity, ‘handicaptivity’, exile, liberty, captors,

underdogs, freedom, hostage, and fight are the words telling the story of the MiCasa home

health care bill\ The accompanying photograph shows demonstrators climbing the Berlin

Wall.

The tenor of the Mouth article sharply differs from story No. 8 in the social equality

division, appearing in New Mobilitv Magazine. The subtitle is a question. “A miracle

medication or an invitation to abuse?’ The story supplies personal information about a

marijuana user before it approaches policy change. The story presents two sides of the issue,

even though it clearly defends marijuana use. The Ragged Edge entry, # 14 in the personal

triumph section, “Epilepsy Poster Child”, is a personal recollection of diagnosis and personal

^The Medicaid Community Attendant Services and Supports Act of 1999, MiCASSA, is proposed legislation which, if signed into law, would allow for a national program of home- and community-based services (attendant services) and would encourage development of system change mechanisms for states to move from the institutional bias that now exists to a community based system. Although programs providing attendant servicescurrently exist in many states throughout the nation, funding for them is far less than what is needed. Many persons with disabilities merely requiring assistance with daily life tasks are wrongly institutionalized in nursing homes solely because they are unable to receive attendant services. MiCASSA allows for choice. For the first time people who are eligible for nursing homes will be able to choose to use their Medicaid dollars for Qualified Community-Based Attendant Services, and live in their own home. Doing this will not only provide a better living environment and qualityo f life for many Americans,it will use Jess tax dollars, since the cost of providing a person with in-home attendant services is much less than the cost of a person occupying a bed in a nursing home. MiCASSA makes good sense. It will save money, and it will put an end to the needless admission of people with disabilities to nursing homes, allowing us to live where most people desire to Jive — at home(www.ca- index.html, 1999).

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pain. It is the story of shame and family misunderstanding. Doctors, medicine, and illness are

the “devils” Finally, story #14 “Being Done” from the personal lifestyles division, printed in

Mainstream Magazine, is an excerpt from Leonard Kriegal’s memoir Flving Solo. There are

no expressions of anger, only the poetic constructions recalling wisdom gained through the

pain of polio hot-bath treatments. Kriegal ponders his crippled body and its ability to transport

him through a life where he must “be a man.” He writes, “If I could not admit that life as a

cripple with deipand courage of me, I was already doomed.. . . It was difficult, if not

impossible, to know whether one was up to what disease had done to one’s life”

(Kriegel,1997, p28). Experience for the sake of wisdom gained, pain survived for the value of

courage found, and insight won at the expense of humiliation and alienation are the life

messages conveyed

Cover Analvsis

The four covers, chosen because the content of each was consistent with the majority

of covers from (he issue it represents, are analyzed for the messages they send graphically.

The June/July 1998 MA features a middle-aged woman, wearing glasses and a black T-shirt

with the words ‘SHRINK RESISTANT’ printed in block capital letters. She is smiling at the

camera. The title “Psychiatric Survivors” is to the left of her head and a no smoking sign is a

blurred patch of red off her other shoulder. She stands in front o f a white columned entrance

of a red brick building. Featured story titles, “Wheelchairs and Batteries” and “Artist Frank

Moore” are situated over the magazine banner. The boldness of the printing on her shirt might

imply strength as her stance outside the formidable building might be seen as escape. The term

‘psychiatric survivor’ denotes victory, hard fought, as might her smile. The other stories are

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equipment and personal triumph stories. This issue cover mixes in the political with emphasis

on the personal.

The June 1998 issue of NM pictures a side, rear view of a man seated in a manual

wheelchair, wearing a work shirt, between the foot of a prison cot, a closed. Commode and

the wall shadowed with prison cell bars. His head is bowed, as though he is in thought or

reading. The title to that story, “Disability behind bars: should the ADA. protect prisoners?”,

and the other featured stories , “Affordable, Accessible travel”, “Chat Rooms: A cure for the

blues” and “Basketball at 50: Shooting for the mainstream” hang at the head of the bed. The

question offered by the title indicates softness on this political issue. The man’s posture

suggests defeat or consideration. Other stories fit the lifestyle division.

The May/ June, 1998, issue features a drawing of a two story building, shaded in

blue, with an attic window and white columns, porch and wide steps. The caption reads

LIVING IN THE PAST, with a subtitle. The National Association of Home Builders takes on aU

comers in its unrelenting fight against building homes all of us can enter. In a sidebar, the

featured stories are listed: Superman’s Telethon, Not Dead Yet’s Unique Message, and

Fiction: Epilepsy Poster Child. RE’s bent is more political than either of the other

publications considered. The cover story address system change as do MA’s and NM’s. but

additionally the feature articles tend toward the political, too.

The MO cover, easily the most political of the four, bears a cover story titled

“Disability Nation Declares Independence fi-om Institutions”. The title hangs over a red and

white striped flag with the ADAPT fi-eedom symbol (the traditional handicapped icon with

stick arms stretched overhead breaking fi-ee fi-om restricting chains) in a red field usually filled

with fifty stars. The title, the flag and a blurred picture of a woman in a wheelchair next to the

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liberty bell all are superimposed on the Declaration of Independence. The automatic

connection to national values of liberty and freedom reinforces the inciting language of the

title. The message of freedom as an American privilege, hard won and covetously protected is

inescapable. The title “Put Your Power behind H.R. 2020”, cuts across the top right comer of

the page. All the feature articles are political; “ADAPT Takes Nation’s Capital By Storm”,

“Gingrich Introduces Mi CASA-The Medicaid Community Attendant Services Act”, “Clinton

ADAPT Summit Scheduled For September 10 At The White House”, “NCIL [National

Council on Independent Living], Self-Advocates, Justice For All, N.O.W.-AU Unite With

ADAPT”, “Nursing Home Operators Rush To Prevent Mass Escape From Their Prisons”, and

“The Real War Has Begun-Enlist Here To Fight For Your Freedom”.

Conclusion

Part of the process of empowerment for the disability community must necessarily be

self-knowledge. Only after recognizing where the community has been, and where it is now,

can a future be envisioned. The combination of content and rhetorical analysis presented here

highUghts the sometimes angry, sometimes frustrated, usuaUy alternative positions of the

vastly individual, yet intricately bonded community. Since “these organs provide an identity to

the movement and a core raUying point for . . . adherents” (Nelson, 1996), it serves us to

understand which are the essential issues. The press characterizes the community’s pain as

being inflicted from misunderstanding, standard operating procedure and mainstream

ignorance. The community’s triumph comes through unity, perseverance and wisdom gained

through experience. Knowing that a majority of the messages are poUtical ones, 68% of that

majority a demand for systemic change, it comes as no surprise to discover that empowerment

in the disabUity community focuses on changing systems, often through legislative procedures.

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Whether changing existing systems precedes or replaces changes to social and material

attitudes and practice is unclear.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. CHAPTER V

Conclusions And Future Study

Political Awareness

The messages of the disability press paint a picture of the disability community.

Although the messages are predominately political ones, covering community issues, there

is ample coverage of the personal concerns of disability. The nature of the personal

messages provides insight into the state of empowerment in the disability community.

Community empowerment begins with the commonality of personal experience. The

personal pieces provide poignant and necessary vantages to a wide range of emotional and

practical glimpses of life challenges confronted and surmounted. The political ones build

on the common^ty discovered through personal revelation. Waging a war with words,

the political articles arouse and incite, seeking to change the status quo. Political

awareness is essential for a community seeking change, as Marx (1845), asserts in the

“German Ideology”:

Furthermore, it follows that every class striving to gain control - even when such

control means t}ie transcendence of the entire old form of society and of control

itself, as is the case with the proletariat - must first win political power in order to

represent its interest in turn as the universal interest, something which the class is

forced to do immediately (p. 120).

59

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The articles that recognize a systemic cause as the root of disability oppression

echo charges of other oppressed groups that “the personal is the political”; women

protesting patriarchy, dissenters decrying imperialism. Blacks rejecting white supremacy

and Socialists fighting systemic causes of hunger and poverty. According to Z, a socialist

magazine described as a community of people concerned about social change:

In each instance we uncovered that “the personal is political,” i.e., the experiences,

feelings, and possibilities of our personal lives were not just a matter of personal

preferences and choices but were limited, molded, and defined by the broader

political and social setting. They feel personal, and their details are personal, but

their broad texture and character, and especially the limits within which these

evolve, are largely systemic. In this sense, the contribution of the New Left was to

say that we suffer a “totality of oppressions,” systemically based, entwined, and all

needing to be eliminated via a revolution” in existing institutions, and the creation

of new liberating ones .

The “personal is political” therefore meant that our personal lives are in

considerable part politically delimited and determined so that improving our

personal experiences meant we must collectively address political relationships and

structures (1997, p. 6-7).

The disability press portrays the community of persons with disabilities as a force

collectively addressing political structures and relationships. Empowerment, for the

community, is necessarily a political process.

The Disabilitv Press and Political Action

There has been no significant change over the past ten years in employment or

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income figures of persons with disabilities. But, in spite of these disappointing indicators,

there is still reason to believe the claim of disability empowerment. There is evidence from

the community press that people with disabilities are more political than ever before.

Increased political awareness signals self-determination, a critical component of an

empowered state. In a community where most standard benchmarks of success like

financial wealth, suitable employment, and independence, may be grossly unattainable,

alternative signposts emerge as substitutes. Individuals, awakening to the recognition that

their personal injustice fits a pattern of injustice, are utilizing legislation, mass

demonstration, and modification of academic curricula in order to seek equality.

Achieving self-determination:

requires not only that persons with disabilities develop inner resources, but also

that society support and respond to them. Self - determination is a lifelong

interplay between the individual and society, in which the individual accepts risk —

taking as a fact of life and in which society, in turn, bases an individual’s worth on

ability, not disability.

Persons with disabilities who want to achieve self — determination

need to learn how they can trust and respect themselves. They also need to learn

to identify their rights and needs and to find the most appropriate ways of

communicating these privileges to others. Most important, people with disabilities

must acquire a sense of political purpose and an understanding of their rights,

responsibilities, and the democratic process (Ward, 1993, p. xvii).

Although reverting to legal action, as some articles suggest, in order to solve

dilemmas can be judged as a drain on social resources and an evasion of responsibility, in

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 62 this case, the use of the legal system is a sign of increased political awareness and

empowerment. Wallace Hendricks, economist from the University of Illinois, reports on

the rise in private legal action:

I know of no time series analyses that would be able to measure before-after

effects of the ADA. It is certainly true, however, that the ADA is associated with

a huge increase in the number of law suits that are cited in the Daily Labor Report.

Casual empiricism would suggest that suits involving disabilities have moved ahead

of all other kinds of suits against firms. (Hendricks, 1999, p. I).

Another indication of political awareness appearing in the press is mass

demonstration. Recently, ADAPT supporters gathered in Washington, D C. to rally for the

“integration mandate’ of the ADA. On May 12, 1999, “disability advocates and activists

took their outrage to the steps of the Supreme Court. Marchers filed into the street to

wheel and walk the four blocks, and a magnificent wave of people, 4000 strong according

to Supreme Court police, gathered before the Supreme Court to send a message to the

justices that will decide the fate of the ADA integration mandate (Thomas, 1999, p. 1).

One more demonstration of increased awareness, hence empowerment, for the

community is increased attention to disabilities studies programs throughout the country

.The press covers school systems, although there are none covering higher education.

Linton (1998) recognizes the value of these programs:

It was, at one time, seamless. There were no disjunctures between the dominant

cultural narrative of disability and the academic narrative. They supported and

defended each other. But in the past twenty years, as the flaws in the civic

response to disability have been exposed, as changing social structures and

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 63 legislative victories reassemble that narrative, the academic tale slips further

behind.

Enter disabilities studies: a location and a means to think critically about

disability, a juncture that can serve both academic discourse and social change.

Disabilities studies provides the means to hold academics accountable for the

veracity and the social consequences of their work, just as activism has served to

hold community, the education system, and the legislature accountable for disabled

people’s compromised social position (p. 1-2).

All of the issues representing emerging empowerment are featured in the

magazines representing the community’s interests. Three of the targeted articles discussed

in the previous chapter dealt with changing school (not university) systems, a majority of

the remainder covered ADA legislation and group action protesting the system. One

article instructed readers on methods for filing their own ADA lawsuits. Searching the

pages of the magazines affords a glimpse of where the community has been, where it is,

and its future vision.

Marxism and Empowerment

Marx’s explanation of the relationship between man and money (including capital,

mode of production and labor) illuminates possible causes of oppression for a number of

alienated populations. His theory, simultaneously placing material considerations as both

determinant and factor of a social superstructure, also has explanatory value for the

disability experience. The inexact, but intrinsically enmeshed relationship between base and

superstmcture is mimicked by the relationships between the material, physical, and social

limitations of disability. But, even though his vision of interconnection is an ideal

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explanation for oppression, it also has value for a community beginning to break patterns,

gain awareness, and shift its consciousness: the empowerment process.

The way that social class impacts persons with disabilities is best demonstrated

through an exception to the rule of poverty. A successful, post-injuiy Christopher Reeve

suggests that wealth is an effective anecdote to many of the oppressions of disability.

Although Reeve has demonstrated that disability, wealth, and social prestige need not be

exclusive, his financial capacity for the best equipment, medical support, and family

responsibility may be a primary determinant of the best scenario results. Nonetheless,

injury remains as physical oppression, no matter what the state of material affairs. For

much of the disabled population, though, poverty aggravates and may be responsible for

disability. Conversely, disability is often a primary eterminant of poverty, whether through

unemployment or astronomical expenses.

The interconnected nature of Marx’s universe allows leaps in consciousness,

resulting in awareness shifts resulting in empowerment. Charlton (1998) says

Marxism typically understood consciousness as metaphorical spirals of practice

(experience) and theory (thought) intertwined. These spirals move incrementally,

quantitatively. Consciousness, however, is not a linear progression. At points this

quantitative buildup congeals into a “rupture,” or a qualitative or transformational

leap to another stage of consciousness where another spiral - like phenomenon

begins.... Consciousness is an awareness of oneself and the world. Furthermore,

consciousness has depth, and as one moves through this space one’s perception of

oneself and the world changes.. . . The point is that consciousness cannot be

separated from the real world, from politics and culture (1998, p.28).

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 65 This change in consciousness is happening in the disability community. Ten years of

telling personal experience, forming political organizations, passing powerful legislation,

and recognizing disabled others as similar has forced such a non-incremental leap.

Through personal practice, mass demonstration, and systemic change, people with

disabilities are affirming their right to exist on an equal plane as others.

Whether or not Marx’s idealized vision of a world where each is equally free to

develop their talents has predictive value for the community is not known. It is possible

that Marx’s communism, the natural evolution of capitalism, would offer a greater place of

equality for people with disabilities. There are certain aspects of communism that would

benefit the class of people with disabilities. Simon (1994) discusses these factors:

Three important features of communist society, as Marx sketched it, also remain

relevant: the rejection of the market as an organizing principal of social relations,

the abolishment of private ownership of means of production, and the nature and

meaning of egalitarianism. Although at the moment socialism appears to the

receding from the political agenda in most places, the question of the market

persists. Is there a viable alternative to the use of the market as an organizing

principal of our economy and more generally, of society?

The idea of an egalitarian society remains relevant. Marx is often taken to

be an enemy of individualism and individual freedom. This is far from the truth. His

vision was of a society in which individuals could for the first time be free to

develop their talents and abilities. But importantly, it was a society in which all

individuals would be equally free to do this.. . . What Marx saw as the true value

was not equality of result but equality of potential, not equality in tension with

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 66 freedom but equality that could only be realized along side of true freedom for all.

Communism would not be a society of the equal result or equal achievement. But

it would be a society in which differences in achievement would not be the cause

of jealousy, envy, or of unnecessary and harmful barriers to individual

achievement. This is, for sure, a heady and utopian vision. But properly

understanding the sense in which Marx was an egalitarian does give us some

purchase on the ways in which we are not (Simon, p. xxxiv-xxxv).

Future Studies

This study, suggesting proofs and methods of empowerment, also uncovers a shift

in the epistemology of disability. An integrated model of disability incorporates body-

centered (Medical Model) and other-created (Social Model) thinking to transcend both.

Although, in this model, impairment is a defining factor of the disability experience, an

entire spectrum of social structures, including economic ones, are inextricably connected

to the impairment base. A new model of disability, while respecting past and current

thinking, attempts to develop a broader base for the causes of disability oppression. Future

research on the interconnected nature of disability, based on Marxist Theory may expand

modem theories of disability.

The disability press captures from the community and passes on to the community

a combination of personal experience and the community expression of sentiments and

cries for equality. The disability press is the glue of the community. Future research

questions may look at how the disability press impacts mainstream coverage of disability

issues and even how the representations of the disability press are changing mainstream

values. This study might have had additional information about each catalogued title and

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 67 specific categorizing details.

Changing the way people think about disability is more than a subtle shift in

consciousness, like the ones made upon realization of the absence of an accessible escape

route or an inaccessible ramp construction. Changing societal decisions about disability are

as gentle as fault line shifts in San Andreas. Porter contends that “[t]he lesson . . . is clear:

writing the disabled body will mean that our most basic conceptions of the body will need

to be rewritten” (Porter, 1993, p. xiv). If we rewrite conceptions of the body, we are

necessarily rewriting ourselves. It follows that with new conceptions of self, the society

that holds the self in relation to millions of other selves will change.

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Graduate College University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Cindy Schwartz McCoy

Home Address: 8617 Highland View Avenue Las Vegas, Nevada 89128

Degrees: Bachelor of Arts The University of the State of New York at Albany

Master of Arts University of Santa Monica

Special Honors and Awards: Membership in Lambda Pi Eta The National Communication Association Honor Society

Publications Top Ten U.S. Cities, New Mobility, December, 1997

Thesis Title: The Disability Press: A Wheel Still in Spin

Thesis Examination Committee: Chairperson, Dr. Richard Jensen, Ph.D. Committee Member, Dr. David Henry, Ph.D. Committee Member, Dr. Gage Chapel, Ph.D. Committee Member, Dr. Lawrence Mullen, Ph.D. Graduate Faculty Representative, Dr. Robert Parker, Ph.D.

74

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